Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins

Hopkins, Sir Frederick Gowland, 1861–1947, English biochemist, educated at Cambridge and the Univ. of London. He was professor of biochemistry at Cambridge (1914–43). Among his contributions were important studies in carbohydrate metabolism and muscular activity, including the discovery of the relationship of lactic-acid formation to muscular contraction. Through his feeding experiments with laboratory animals he concluded that "accessory food factors" (later named vitamins) are essential to health. For this work he shared with Christian Eijkman the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was knighted in 1925. His works include Newer Aspects of the Nutrition Problem (1922), The Problems of Specificity in Biochemical Catalysis (1931), and Chemistry and Life (1933).

See J. G. Crowther, British Scientists of the Twentieth Century (1952).